Ideology is Everything

myths of superiority in religion, politics and mass formation

In this episode, I look at myths of superiority in religion, politics and mass formation citing Tessa Lena, Jack Sirius, Joe Atwill, Jim Reagan, Robert Malone, John Waters, Scott Adams and Guttermouth! Topics include gnosticism, God the monster, Darwin the snob, hatchet jobs and backhanded apologies.

I’ve often said that every argument I’m in boils down to my one dogma: we are not superior to other people. I’ve been having a wonderful, beautiful conversation with Tessa Lena on, of all things, her post on gnosticism. The question was can you, should you, and how do you talk to people about why their belief systems are wrong? This doesn’t just apply to ‘the things you don’t talk about in polite society’—religion and politics—but to the third rail of social discourse today: ‘vaccines’ and the Covid-verse.

I’m not going to transcribe the video because I hope you watch it, but here are the summarized points with links, quotes and further thoughts:

Myths of Superiority in Religion and Atheism

As I’ve explained in other episodes, there are only three possibilities for ultimate reality: 1) God is a Monster 2) There is no God or 3) There is no world.

When someone’s religion gives them a sense of security or hope, is it because of a scripture that says God likes them best? Does this same scripture justify land-theft, domination, slavery and even torture? If people feel secure by ‘virtue’ of their divine favoritism, the religion is a fig leaf for empire, as shown in my episode on Jesus is the OG Psy-Ops.

But atheists have their own version of superiority as I’ve talked about with Darwin and his disdain for the Yanama people. Survival of the fittest implies that those who are most successful have earned it, whether it’s through conquest or violence. In Alien Nation, I plot atheists and theists on one axis and superiority on the other, and show that a belief in superiority transcends a belief in God.

The only explanation that allows for the possibility of a God who isn’t a monster is that the world isn’t as it seems. If we are One Mind, the world can exist in it rather than our minds existing separately in the world. God can’t intervene because to do so would make the world real. We can intervene because we’re the dreamer and every figure in the dream represents us. There’s no limit to what we can change.

Myths of Superiority in Politics

In my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, I talk about democracy as a defense of empire and the “anathematization of anarchism” as Jack Sirius puts it. I’ve put this video into my Politics IS Division playlist because politics, which is really personalitics, only works by pitting one side against the other. It’s not merely a belief that certain policies are better but that people on your side are better than others.

In global politics, war is only possible without a belief in the inherent superiority of some people over others. This can be tested by reversing the players, as Caitlin Johnstone does in “Chinese Aggression” Sure Looks a Lot like US Aggression.

Myths of Superiority in Mass Formation

Why does it matter which came first—the manufacturing of fear to mandate masks, lockdowns and vaccines or the willingness to comply with mandates based on fear? That’s what I see as the central question in the heated debate over Mattais Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Jim Reagan has authored a post on this topic, with the subtitle “… and why it matters.” It starts with a quote from Robert Malone:

As we approach 2023, you are now completing and have survived the third year of the largest, most globally coordinated psychological warfare operation in the history of mankind. During this period, on a daily basis, you have experienced the US Government and many western nations deploying highly refined, military-grade fifth generation warfare technologies against their own citizens.—Dr. Robert Malone, December 12, 2022.

In this, I completely agree with Robert although I’m not sure he agrees with himself. In a recent episode, Matt Ehret asks Why is Robert Malone Pushing Anti-China Misinformation? According to Matt, Robert “asserts Covid to have been an intentionally crafted and released bioweapon which killed millions in a war to destroy western civilization rendering humanity enslaved to the new Chinese master class.” So is China the villain or are US and western nations targeting themselves?

Jim starts his analysis saying:

But totalitarianism is a political problem, not a psychological problem. Yes, “masses” under totalitarianism suffer psychological problems but the origin of totalitarianism is, first, near-complete control of communication (censorship) so that the truth can’t be heard, and secondly, surveillance of the population to ensure that everyone is acting as the authorities would have them act.

What I love about Jim’s perspective is that it’s based on logic that’s not opposed to intuition:

My position is that logic should be based on intuition, and within that intuition the use of logic and reason then leads to more intuition and more “seeing.” Logic helps us see more as we peer through the world of concepts and talk to each other. But without a basic intuition of compassion, without this basic seeing which can’t be described but can only be understood in a concrete, here-and-now intuition that the living world before us offers, there’s blindness. …

We depend on logic to help determine truth. Narratives can describe reality but they depend on the “checks and balances” of logic and reason. Narratives may be true or false, or may be somewhat misguided. If we throw out logic and depend on narratives alone, then the contradictions between narratives and reality are left unchecked and can grow into monsters.

I also like that Jim focuses on the ideas of PT, as he abbreviates, and not personality or motives:

In chapter four, “The (Im)measurable Universe,” we’re told that during the Covid crisis, we all acted out a pressing psychological need for certainly and thus believed the numbers put out by health agencies throughout the world. On page 58, PT explicitly says that “we have called the misery that has been so dramatized in the mass media down on ourselves to a large extent….” How? Because we believed the numbers given to us, we believed the data, and the reason we believed the numbers and the data is because we’ve been captured by, and put our blind faith in, the mechanistic world of science. …

We believed the data not because we were so confused that we couldn’t distinguish truth from fiction, but because reliable and qualified voices opposed to official data were viciously censored. The mainstream media was blaring fear-messages at us 24/7; it was absolutely relentless, and the health authorities that should have advised us all to “keep calm and carry on” did the exact opposite. The “masses” were formed by massive censorship. They did not self-hypnotize themselves.

I would like to add two things to Jim’s analysis. First, although the masses were hypnotized, those who are reading PT were not. They were able to think for themselves. Why? Obviously, because they’re smarter, more awake people. It has the seduction of superiority hidden within its argument.

It’s not that, like me, they didn’t need to get the vaccine to keep a job, and therefore didn’t have the cognitive dissonance. In a clever cartoon called Rat Says, one rodent quips, “There are many reason I didn’t get the vaccine but the most important … I dodged it because I could.” So I would add economics to Jim’s list.

As I was recording this, a reader named Reggie VanderVeen suggested that I should read John Waters’ The Psychology of a Hatchet Job. Here is an excerpt:

One might imagine, then, that Mattias Desmet would be venerated throughout the ‘freedom movement’, and to a degree he is. But there has also been this recurring pattern of denigration and misrepresentation, ultimately suggesting itself as rooted in envy or something more sinister. The tendency has not merely been to question his analysis — a valid exercise, and one he welcomes and enters into wholeheartedly and without rancour when it occurs — but to discredit him and, it often seems, take him down. More worrying is that the criticism has frequently been accompanied by grotesque insinuations concerning his motives and loyalties. This has seemed not merely gratuitous and unhelpful to the wider effort, but makes no sense either in its granular content or in yielding up any possible motivation that is not malign. The most recent of these onslaughts to come across my desk is an article, Covid-19 — Mass Formation or Mass Atrocity? by David Hughes, Valerie Kyrie and Daniel Broudy, published last November on unlimitedhangouts.com. The review is 15,000 words long, but it might be just a tweet, for it has the character and integrity of a shitpost of 240 characters.

Referring to the authors as ‘the troika’ throughout, John seems to do what he’s accusing them of—character ad hominem attacks instead of a discussion of the ideas. Towards the end of his extensive article, he summarizes:

The truth here is crisply conveyed by a couple of citations from Desmet’s book:

‘Is there not any steering and manipulation at all then? The answer is a resounding yes, there most certainly is all kinds of manipulation. And with the means available to today's mass media, the possibilities are simply phenomenal. Such steering, however, is primarily not a steering by individuals; the most fundamental steering is impersonal in nature. The steering is first and foremost driven by an ideology — a way of thinking. Ideologies organize and structure society progressively and organically.’ (Page 131)

The invitation that I’d like to extend to Reggie, Jim and others is to discuss in the comments the solution to which PT leads. My concern with PT is that it doesn’t leave anywhere to go. If the ideology is organic and simply impersonal human nature, what’s the solution? And why is it so important to Robert Malone, John Waters, Jon Rappaport and others that we agree with PT? If it has no solution, who cares?

For the Breggins and others, the problem is the global predators: if we can get them out of power, the problem will be solved. I don’t know if that’s true either. My focus is on systems and I think it creates parasites. If we can remove the host from the parasites—our communities, our economies, our labor—they will shrivel up on their own. So I think this is a better use of our time and energy.

The Myth of Superiority in Backhanded Apologies

To end, I was going to talk about the Scott Adams “You anti-vaxxers win!” video. But Guttermouth, one of my favorite bloggers, has done a much funnier job in I’m Sorry You’re an Asshole: the Art of the Backhanded Apology. She also has this astute analysis ending a post about chickens:

I’m kind of surprised that it only now came to me, but as I was reading some WEF and public health horseshit about eggs, I found myself specifically noticing how much the focus of all the things the authoritarian trenders want to radically redesign or eliminate from daily life seems to be things people ENJOY. Notice the loudest trumpeting about what we need to do to stop climate change or vaccine injury sudden death or racism is stuff that makes us happy? It’s never anything most people are indifferent to or ignorant of; it always seems to be about sacrifice. Most of what has been heralded as “progress” throughout history was things that were ostensibly going to make people happier or make work easier or improve social harmony? If I were a despotic social engineer, I would think you’d have to occasionally promote changes that people are actually excited or happy about amidst taking away all their rights and stuff. It feels like social manipulation 101, in fact: convince people they’ll be happier or more prosperous doing the thing you want them to do even if that’s exaggerated or false. Has anyone presented an UPSIDE to taking away our diets, lifestyles, energy, homes, and cultures, apart from “we must do this to stop a constantly erroneously predicted extinction?” I feel like that isn’t a sustainable motivation even for GOOD ideas, especially when the sky never seems to fall on time.

Something something nothing left to lose?

And in two post postscripts, Dr. Paul Alexander goes ballistic in Cicero & Dr. Robert Malone, what do they have in common? One talked about the enemy within, the other IS the enemy within. And Sasha Latypova has the most interesting take I’ve seen on the “bombshell” Project Veritas video in OMG! Pfizer is MUTATING COVID!!! If the escalating exclamation points don’t give it away, it isn’t what you think.

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For more of this ilk, try Six Levels of Reality on Jeremy Gilbert:

Responds to Russell Brand's interview of Jeremy by applying Lee Camp's Four Levels of Reality and adding two more. Expands on Jeremy's ideological critique of education by citing John Taylor Gatto on mass compulsory schooling as mental colonization. Answers the title, "Is There Any Point to Left-Wing Politics?" by defining left vs. right as need vs. greed, with neither representing a system of reciprocity. Questions whether politics even exists, rather than the 'personalitics' of a popularity contest.

or Truth-Telling in a Time of Catastrophe:

I begin this video with the story of my daughter's wedding, which I'm taking as an omen for the community we're going to build when the empire crumbles. Then I read my poem on the double bind of being a Cassandra during these troubled times, and my vision for how it's all going to turn around.

and Thinking Clearly about Empire on John Campbell:

Responds to Russell Brand's interview of Dr. John Campbell, Is It Possible to be Truly Objective? Examines the artificial dichotomy of the vaxophile vs. the vaxophobe and the superstitions of fear. Applies mathematical thinking to theology and uses Occam's razor for why Matt Taibbi and Caitlin Johnstone got Russia's invasion of Ukraine wrong.